How World Building Can Influence Plot (Essay) (Patreon)

I’m a little behind on chapter edits with The Blood of Life because I’ve focused on getting new material down, so I’m going to talk about how world building can directly influence plot. I’ve got a fun example from the book from the book, I’d like to use.

Radic, the vampire protagonist of the Blood of Life, is at times a moody character. He talks a lot about his past that he is now cut off from, and one of the core elements of the book is his quest to find out what happened to his family after he was turned into a vampire and fled.

One thing I’ve done with the vampire element is I tweaked how they transform in this setting. Vampires in the setting have access to a bat form, but I didn’t give them a mist form. This is not at all a major change, but I made a simple world building decision that has rippled through the book. Every time Radic wants to use his bat ability, he has to undress since he cannot transform his clothing. If he doesn’t undress, he risks getting entangled in his own clothes. Since this is an 18+ adult erotic romance, it felt right to go this route.

Many pieces of werewolf fiction have treated clothing as a victim of the transformation, unless the werewolf plans ahead with loose fitting clothes, which can then be stylishly ripped while still being discrete. The vast majority of Dracula adaptations have him transforming his clothes. It’s practical for a PG story, and it also means the fancy clothes Dracula wears remain intact.

By blocking Radic from having this ability, it’s required me to alter how he interacts with the world. This means he’s often nude, and if Radic wants to go somewhere in bat form, he needs a change of clothes. This requires him to plan his movements, and while he can cover much more ground than other characters in the book, he cannot just transform back and pretend he wasn’t up to something. For the current chapter I’m working on, this is how I ended up with naked fox breaking into a castle, because getting over the ramparts is easy for him. He just has no clothes so if he gets caught, there’s no way to explain this away.

In some stories, this might not be a big deal, but for a novel that features a mystery, it makes investigation by the vampire more difficult. It controls how he can interact with the plot. Beyond how it limits his ability to exploit his ability to fly to any location he wants, it has resulted in a character who is not shy about being nude. I really didn’t think the change was going to be quite so monumental when I made it, but it’s proven to be a tricky yet interesting restriction to work with.

There are other things in the book that have been shaped by feedback I got from my writing group. I’ll talk more about that in a later post.